There’s a lot of evidence that the first known game of dodgeball dates back to Africa 200 years ago, but it was more deadly than how it’s played today.

Rather than using soft balls, players instead threw rocks at their opponents in an attempt to injure them or finish them off. Other scholars thought the history went even further than that, and that the game was played to the death. Tribes used this game to work out and it taught them about the values of teamwork.

A missionary, James H. Carlisle, was a spectator of many games and sought out a plan to make the gameplay more safe for everyone. However, the pupils from his local England didn’t have the natural accuracy or agility to either throw or dodge, and he couldn’t encourage anybody no matter how much he talked about the sport.

Carlisle later turned the original concept of dodgeball into a much safer game. Leather balls would now be thrown instead of rocks, and it would be set on an open field. Players were called “out” if they were ever bit with a ball.

In 1884, Phillip Ferguson watched a couple of games being played at St. Mary’s College between students from Yale University. He liked the concept of the game but thought up an idea for it to be quicker. Ferguson changed the rules so that two teams were on either side of the playing field, and brought the rules over to America, which were made official in 1905.

News about the popularity of the game spread across England, and the new rules became the norm for which all dodgeball matches were played.

Still, at St. Mary’s College, the campus hosts dodgeball matches for Yale students with the original rules in play every four years to commemorate the founding fathers of the sport and its African origins.